BLITHE SPIRIT Character Sides

Please choose one and deliver in a British accent

This is in addition to your prepared monologue
CHARLES (to Ruth): Well, to begin with, I havent forgotten Elvira. I remember
her very distinctly indeed. I remember how fascinating she was, and how
maddening. I remember how badly she played all games and how cross she got
when she didnt win. I remember her gay charm when she had achieved her own
way over something and her extreme acidity when she didnt. I remember her
physical attractiveness, which was tremendous, and her spiritual integrity, which
was nil.
RUTH (to Charles): Ive been making polite conversation all through dinner
last night and breakfast and lunch todayand its been a nightmareand Im not
going to do it anymore. I dont like Elvira any more than she likes me, and whats
more, Im certain that I never could have, dead or alive. I am now going up to my
room and I shall have my dinner on a tray. You and she can have the house to
yourselves and joke and gossip with each other to your hearts content. The first
thing in the morning I am going up to London to interview the Psychical Research
Society, and if they fail me I shall go straight to the Archbishop of Canterbury
ELVIRA (to Charles): I sat there, on the other side, just longing for you day
after day. I did really. All through your affair with that brassy looking woman in
the South of France I went on loving you and thinking truly of you. Then you
married Ruth and even then I forgave you and tried to understand because all the
time I believed deep inside that you really loved me bestthats why I put myself
down for a return visit and had to fill in all those forms and wait about in drafty
passages for hours. If only youd died before you met Ruth, everything might
have been all right. Shes absolutely ruined you. I hadnt been in the house a
day before I realized that.
MADAME ARCATI (to Ruth): Your attitude from the outset has been most
unpleasant, Mrs. Condomine. Some of your remarks have been discourteous in
the extreme and I should like to say, without umbrage, that if you and your
husband were foolish enough to tamper with the unseen for paltry motives and in
a spirit of ribaldry, whatever has happened to you is your own fault, and, to coin a
phrase, as far as Im concerned you can stew in your own juice.
DR. BRADMAN (about Arcati): Of course she doesnt believe. The whole
things a put-up job. I must say, though, she shoots a more original line than they
generally do. The trance was genuine enough; but that, of course, is easily
accounted fora form of hysteria, I should imagine.
MRS. BRADMAN (to Ruth): That happens sometimes, you know. Everything
seems to go wrong at once. Exactly as though there were some evil forces at
work. I remember once when George and I went away for a fortnights holiday,
not long after we were married, we were dogged by bad luck from beginning to

end. The weather was vileGeorge sprained his ankleI caught a cold and had
to stay in bed for two daysand to crown everything the lamp fell over in the
sitting-room and set fire to the treatise George had written on hyperplasia of the
abdominal glands.
EDITH (to Madame Arcati): By the fireplaceoh!...Let me go! I havent done
nothing nor seen nobody! Let me go back to bed!